Help deliver a special Christmas to local families

Aim

Can you bring a little comfort and joy to others this Christmas? We want to provide a seasonal hamper to each of our 100 Food Club members.

We currently serve 100 members (households) during a 3-hour period on 1 day a week, over the past 4 years. We have constant demand from local residents on low incomes to become members, but we have reached our capacity at the moment in terms of food, volunteers and paid worker support.

We also have a waiting list for people offering to volunteer. Our current capacity means that we don’t have enough ‘work’ to take on any more volunteers.

We need more funding to expand our capacity to meet the needs in our local community ahead of what we know will be a challenging Christmas period for many local families and communities. We know from 4 years’ experience that there would be more demand for the Food Club services if we had the capacity to expand. Our services include regular access to low-cost healthy food, opportunities to move into paid work, increased community cohesion, and reduced social isolation.

For Christmas we want to provide a home made boxed up Christmas Day and Boxing Day meal , and a small hamper, for all of our members. We will distribute these when our members visit our venue on 22nd December, and make deliveries to those who are  still self isolating.

Our members include families who are benefits, people on zero hour contracts, older people and those with long term health conditions on benefits, refugees and asylum seekers, and people who earn a low income and can’t manage to buy enough food and pay all of their bills.

This is not the only initiative we are using to bring in donations. We know that money is also tight for local businesses so rather than ask them to donate money, we have created a reverse Advent Calendar for the 24  Days of December, asking local businesses to donate through December one item every day- for example, December 1st is a Christmas pudding; December 19th is a packet or tin of custard and December 24th is a packet or box of chocoates - or giving the businesses the option to give us £25 so we can go out and buy the items. This initiative is growing in momentum and gaining traction with local meda and social media.

This project successfully funded on 26th January 2023